In the conventional system testing, testers typically perform a parallel testing within one machine, either multi-threading or multi-processing, to shorten testing time cycles. However, different threads and processes on the testing machine still compete for the same computing resources. The other approach is to use multiple sets of statically configured computing hardware for parallel testing, or distributed testing. This configuration requires more computing resources. Further, this static configuration of resources is not adaptable to dynamic reconfigurations of hardware resources to meet the changed testing requirements.
Products such as Surgient VQMS™ and VMware vCenter Lab Manager™ provide resource reservation features in a virtual data center. These products are used to setup the required environment for executing tests.